“She wasn’t mine!”
“Uh-huh. Or it could mean that although she wasn’t yours, you were under a deep obligation to her, and Kampf had given her a dirty deal, or he was threatening her with something, and she wanted him disposed of, and you obliged. Or of course it could be merely that Kampf had something on you.”
He had his head tilted back so he could look down on me. “You’re in the wrong racket,” he asserted. “You ought to be writing TV scripts.”
I stuck with him only a few more minutes, having got all I could hope for under the circumstances. Since I was letting him assume that I was a city employee, I couldn’t very well try to pry him loose for a trip to Wolfe’s place. Also I had two more calls to make, and there was no telling when I might be interrupted by a phone call or a courier to one of them from downtown. The only further item I gathered from Jerome Aland was that he wasn’t trying to get from under by slipping in any insinuations about his co-tenants. He had no opinions or ideas about who had killed poor Phil. When I left he stood up, but he let me go and open the door for myself.
I went down a flight, to Meegan’s door, and knocked and waited. Just as I was raising a fist to make it louder and better there were footsteps inside, and the door opened. Meegan was still in his shirt sleeves and still uncombed.
“Well?” he demanded.
“Back again,” I said firmly but not offensively. “With a few questions. If you don’t mind?”
“You know damn well I mind.”
“Naturally. Mr. Talento has been called down to the District Attorney’s office. This might possibly save you another trip there.”
He sidestepped, and I went in. The room was the same size and shape as Aland’s, above, and the furniture, though different, was no more desirable. The table against a wall was lopsided — probably the one that Jewel Jones hoped they had fixed for him. I took a chair at its end, and he took another and sat frowning at me.
“Haven’t I seen you before?” he wanted to know.
“Sure, we were here with the dog.”
“I mean before that. Wasn’t it you in Nero Wolfe’s office yesterday?”
“That’s right.”
“How come?”
I raised my brows. “Haven’t you got the lines crossed, Mr. Meegan? I’m here to ask questions, not to answer them. I was in Wolfe’s office on business. I often am. Now—”
“He’s a fat, arrogant halfwit!”
“You may be right. He’s certainly arrogant. Now, I’m here on business.” I got out my notebook and pencil. “You moved into this place nine days ago. Please tell me exactly how you came to take this apartment.”
He glared. “I’ve told it at least three times.”
“I know. This is the way it’s done. I’m not trying to catch you in some little discrepancy, but you could have omitted something important. Just assume I haven’t heard it before. Go ahead.”
“Oh, my God.” His head dropped and his lips tightened. Normally he might not have been a bad-looking guy, with blond hair and gray eyes and a long bony face, but now, having spent the night, or most of it, with Homicide and the DA, he looked it, especially his eyes, which were red and puffy.
He lifted his head. “I’m a commercial photographer — in Pittsburgh. Two years ago I married a girl named Margaret Ryan. Seven months later she left me. I didn’t know whether she went alone or with somebody. She just left. She left Pittsburgh too, or anyway I couldn’t find her there, and her family never saw her or heard from her. About five months later, about a year ago, a man I know, a businessman I do work for, came back from a trip to New York and said he’d seen her in a theater here with a man. He went and spoke to her, but she claimed he was mistaken. He was sure it was her. I came to New York and spent a week looking around but didn’t find her. I didn’t go to the police because I didn’t want to. You want a better reason, but that’s mine.”
“I’ll skip that.” I was writing in the notebook. “Go ahead.”
“Two weeks ago I went to look at a show of pictures at the Institute in Pittsburgh. There was a painting there, an oil, a big one. It was called ‘Three Young Mares at Pasture,’ and it was an interior, a room, with three women in it. One of them was on a couch, and two of them were on a rug on the floor. They were eating apples. The one on the couch was my wife. I was sure of it the minute I saw her, and after I stood and studied it I was even surer. There was absolutely no doubt of it.”
“We’re not challenging that,” I assured him. “What did you do?”
“The artist’s signature looked like Chapple, but of course the catalogue settled that. It was Ross Chaffee. I went to the Institute office and asked about him. They thought he lived in New York but weren’t sure. I had some work on hand I had to finish, and it took a couple of days, and then I came to New York. I had no trouble finding Ross Chaffee; he was in the phone book. I went to see him at his studio — here in this house. First I told him I was interested in that figure in his painting, that I thought she would be just right to model for some photographs I wanted to do, but he said that his opinion of photography as a medium was such that he wouldn’t care to supply models for it, and he was bowing me out, so I told him how it was. I told him the whole thing. Then he was different. He sympathized with me and said he would be glad to help me if he could, but he had painted that picture more than a year ago, and he used so many different models for his pictures that it was impossible to remember which was which.”
Meegan stopped, and I looked up from the notebook. He said aggressively, “I’m repeating that that sounded phony to me.”
“Go right ahead. You’re telling it.”
“I say it was phony. A photographer might use hundreds of models in a year, and he might forget, but not a painter. Not a picture like that. I got a little tactless with him, and then I apologized. He said he might be able to refresh his memory and asked me to phone him the next day. Instead of phoning I went back the next day to see him, but he said he simply couldn’t remember and doubted if he ever could. I didn’t get tactless again. Coming in the house, I had noticed a sign that there was a furnished apartment to let, and when I left Chaffee I found the janitor and rented it, and went to my hotel for my bags and moved in. I knew damn well my wife had modeled for that picture, and I knew I could find her. I wanted to be as close as I could to Chaffee and the people who came to see him.”
I wanted something too. I wanted to say that he must have had a photograph of his wife along and that I would like to see it, but of course I didn’t dare, since it was a cinch that he had already either given it to the cops, or refused to, or claimed he didn’t have one. So I merely asked, “What progress did you make?”
“Not much. I tried to get friendly with Chaffee but didn’t get very far. I met the other two tenants, Talento and Aland, but that didn’t get me anywhere. Finally I decided I would have to get some expert help, and that was why I went to see Nero Wolfe. You were there, you know how that came out — that big blob.”
I nodded. “He has dropsy of the ego. What did you want him to do?”
“I’ve told you.”
“Tell it again.”
“I was going to have him tap Chaffee’s phone.”
“That’s illegal,” I said severely.
“All right, I didn’t do it.”
I flipped a page of the notebook. “Go back a little. During that week, besides the tenants here, how many of Chaffee’s friends and acquaintances did you meet?”
“Just two, as I’ve told you. A young woman, a model, in his studio one day, and I don’t remember her name, and a man that was there another day, a man that Chaffee said buys his pictures. His name was Braunstein.”